Try Wonders for freeHow the literature is organised
The oldest listed works are from public health and psychology around the turn of the century. In 2002 The Lancet published both Campbell on health consequences and Jewkes on causes and prevention; Coker et al. (2002) reported physical and mental health effects for men and women, and Golding (1999) had already meta-analysed IPV as a risk factor for mental disorders.
The WHO multi-country study on women's health and domestic violence used standardised household surveys in 15 sites across ten countries — Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand and Tanzania. Garcia-Moreno et al. (2006) interviewed 24,097 women and found lifetime prevalence of physical or sexual partner violence ranging from 15% to 71% between sites; Ellsberg et al. (2008) reported the associated physical and mental health problems. Devries et al. (2013) then used data from 81 countries to estimate global prevalence, in Science.
A parallel literature concerns children. Kitzmann et al. (2003) meta-analysed 118 studies of children exposed to interparental violence, finding worse outcomes than for non-witnesses but no significant difference from physically abused children. Holt, Buckley and Whelan (2008) reviewed the impact of exposure on children and young people. Capaldi et al. (2012) systematically reviewed 228 articles on risk factors for perpetration and victimisation.
Main debates
Who the research is about, and how it is measured, is the argument to understand before you read the prevalence figures. The Cochrane review by Kalra et al. (2021) states the mainstream position plainly: it reflects the current understanding of IPV as a profoundly gendered issue, perpetrated most often by men against women. Scott-Storey et al. (2023) argue from the other side that men's victimisation has not been examined thoroughly, and that the field's habit of comparing only the prevalence of discrete incidents, using measures not designed to capture men's conceptualisations of IPV, and ignoring the sex and gender identity of both victim and perpetrator, limits what those comparisons can show. Whichever position a source takes, check which acts it counted and over what period.
What health services should do is the second open question. Kalra et al. (2021) pooled 19 trials with 1,662 participants and found that training providers may improve their attitudes, knowledge and self-perceived readiness, with low to very low certainty of evidence; no study assessed the effect on the mental health of the women concerned. Heron and Eisma (2021) synthesised 34 qualitative studies and found that barriers to disclosure persist despite the policies meant to remove them.
Where recent work is heading
Recent citations concentrate on the pandemic (Piquero et al., 2021; Kourti et al., 2023; Peitzmeier et al., 2022; Muldoon et al., 2021; Lyons and Brewer, 2022), on updated global estimates — White et al. (2024) pooled 201 studies covering 250,599 women and report increased odds of depression, PTSD and suicidality in women exposed to IPV — and on mental health, where the Lancet Psychiatry Commission (Oram et al., 2022) sets an agenda for research and services. Qualitative work on help-seeking is the other active area: barriers for men (Taylor et al., 2022, who surveyed 147 men, most in the UK), for Black, Asian, minority ethnic and immigrant women facing institutional racism, immigration law and gaps in service provision (Hulley et al., 2023), and to disclosure in health care (Heron and Eisma, 2021). Stubbs and Szoeke (2022) review the physical health effects, which they note are less researched than the mental health and pregnancy ones.